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Things Beyond Resemblance things beyond resemblance COLUMBIA THEMES IN PHILOSOPHY, SOCIAL CRITICISM, AND THE ARTS Collected Essays resemblance ROBERT HULLOT-KENTOR things beyond on THEODOR W. ADORNO COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex Copyright © 2006 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hullot-Kentor, Robert. Things beyond resemblance : collected essays on Theodor W. Adorno / Robert Hullot-Kentor. p. cm. — (Columbia themes in philosophy, social criticism, and the arts) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-231-13658-7 (alk. paper) 1. Adorno, Theodor W., 1903–1969.I.Title. b3199.a34h85 2006 193—dc22 2006017599 Casebound editions of Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 columbia themes in philosophy, social criticism, and the arts Lydia Goehr and Gregg M. Horowitz, editors Advisory Board J. M. Bernstein Eileen Gillooly Noël Carroll Thomas S. Grey T. J. Clark Miriam Bratu Hansen Arthur C. Danto Robert Hullot-Kentor Martin Donougho Michael Kelly David Frisby Richard Leppert Boris Gasparov Janet Wolff Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts presents monographs, essay collec- tions, and short books on philosophy and aesthetic theory. It aims to publish books that show the ability of the arts to stimulate critical reflection on modern and contemporary social, political, and cultural life. Art is not now, if it ever was, a realm of human activity independent of the complex realities of social organization and change, political authority and antagonism, cultural domination and resistance. The possibilities of critical thought embedded in the arts are most fruitfully ex- pressed when addressed to readers across the various fields of social and humanistic inquiry. The idea of philosophy in the series’ title ought to be understood, therefore, to embrace forms of discus- sion that begin where mere academic expertise exhausts itself, where the rules of social, political, and cultural practice are both affirmed and challenged, and where new thinking takes place. The series does not privilege any particular art, nor does it ask for the arts to be mutually isolated. The series encourages writing from the many fields of thoughtful and critical inquiry. Pour Odile Contents Acknowledgments XI Introduction: Origin Is the Goal 1 Back to Adorno 23 Things Beyond Resemblance 45 The Philosophy of Dissonance: Adorno and Schoenberg 67 Critique of the Organic: Kierkegaard and the Construction of the Aesthetic 77 Second Salvage: Prolegomenon to a Reconstruction of Current of Music 94 Title Essay: Baroque Allegory and “The Essay as Form” 125 What Is Mechanical Reproduction? 136 Adorno Without Quotation 154 x CONTENTS Popular Music and “The Aging of the New Music” 169 The Impossibility of Music 180 Apple Criticizes Tree of Knowledge: A Review of One Sentence 190 Right Listening and a New Type of Human Being 193 Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Recovery of the Public World 210 Suggested Reading: Jameson on Adorno 220 Introduction to T. W. Adorno’s “The Idea of Natural-History” 234 The Idea of Natural-History 252 Theodor W. Adorno Notes 271 Index 305 Acknowledgments It is a pleasure to express my gratitude to Rolf Tiedemann, Tom Huhn, Mowry Baden, Robert Kaufman, and Richard Leppert for their friendship and for their help over the years with these many es- says and to Martin Jay as well, alias g.K and sine qua non. The author also acknowledges the kind permission from the follow- ing publishers to reprint, in some cases in revised form, “Things Be- yond Resemblance,” in Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music (Minnesota: University of Minnesota, 2006); “Second Salvage,” in Cultural Critique 60 (2005): 134–169; “Right Listening and a New Type of Human Being,” in RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 44 (2003): 191–198; “Adorno Without Quotation,” in RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 45 (2004): 5–10; “Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Recov- ery of the Public World,” as “Past Tense,” in The Recovery of the Pub- lic World, ed. Charles Watts and Edward Byrne (Vancouver: Talon, 1999), pp. 365–372; “The Philosophy of Dissonance: Adorno and Schoenberg,” in Semblance of the Subject, ed. Thomas Huhn and Lambert Zuidervart (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), pp. 309–320; “Suggested Reading,” in Telos 89 (1993): 167–177; “Apple Criticizes Tree of Knowledge,” as “Beckett Up to Date,” Telos 92 (1993): 192; xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS “The Impossibility of Music,” in Telos 87 (1991): 97–117; Popular Mu- sic and Adorno’s “The Aging of the New Music,” in Telos 77 (1989): 79–94; “Back to Adorno,” in Telos 81 (1989): 5–29; “Critique of the Or- ganic,” in Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aes- thetic (Minnesota: University of Minnesota, 1989), pp. x–xxiii; “Intro- duction to ‘The Idea of Natural-History,’” in Telos 57 (1985): 111–124; Theodor W. Adorno, “The Idea of Natural-History,” trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor in Telos 57 (1985): 97–110; “Title Essay,” in New Ger- man Critique 32 (1984): 141–150. things beyond resemblance Introduction Origin Is the Goal There is only the question: When will I be blown up? —William Faulkner, Noble Prize speech (1950) Written in the imperative in 1989, the essay that leads this col- lection—“Back to Adorno”—urged renewed interest in the oeuvre of a philosopher and social critic who had been consigned to temporal backwaters both in Europe and the United States. In Europe Adorno had by that year already undergone two decades of a second exile, not, as in his own lifetime, as a Jew from Germany but as a posthumous ex- ile from European political and philosophical consciousness: in a mat- ter of months after his refusal to support the revolutionary student ac- tivism of soixante-huit and having summoned the police to clear the university halls of demonstrators—followed soon after by his death— the masses of students who had for years considered his work and pro- nouncements in awed attentiveness, and practiced its epigrammatic phrasings as if proclaiming the open sesame of history itself, would hardly acknowledge these same writings and words except with bitter dismissal. In the United States the situation was opposite yet in a sense identical: for though Adorno’s work had never been broadly studied and had certainly never experienced a period of centrality to social and political thought as in Europe, the journal—Telos—that had most sub- stantially introduced his work to the United States and provided his major interpreters was no longer motivated by his thinking. A consen- 2 INTRODUCTION: ORIGIN IS THE GOAL sus existed that whatever might be found in the corpus of Adorno’s writings had already been sifted and was not of first or much impor- tance at all. At the same time, poststructuralism had, for more than a decade, occupied center stage. This was puzzling, since structural- ism itself had never been so established in the United States as to plau- sibly motivate such widespread and detailed criticism here. But there was no mistaking the appeal with which its associated linguistic ges- tures spread endemically across a rigidifying pragmatic heartland. In decades when the engineering differential—stress—excluded in one sweep from public reference the psychodynamic concept of anxiety, academia’s contribution to a nation always wanting to get things done as with hammer and saw, rather than by invoking intellect, was to pro- vide reading to dislodge interpretation, rewriting to take the place of conceptualization, and the handy toughness profiled in any announced deconstruction to easily trump weak-willed critique and the fragile mentalism of insight. At elite universities those presentations succeeded that made nostrils flare at any privileging that had dared take place off campus. It was a minor detail, but one relevant here, that during this period the scholarly journals attached to those universities often enough rejected work concerning Adorno with an accompanying note that this was a topic that in some distant past had already long come and gone. Nineteen eighty-nine itself is in any case not so remote that much is required to present the situation in which “Back to Adorno” was writ- ten. But the reason for this brief history is not to affirm the essay’s im- pulse unreservedly, whether in its first moment or now. For even if in- stance after instance from the history of philosophy were amassed to ballast the claim that philosophy has progressed almost as a rule under the flag of one kind of return or another—whether as “back to Kant” or as Kant’s return to Plato, as Husserl’s return to Descartes or as Hei- degger’s return to the pre-Socratics—this would not justify promot- ing the same under the banner of a return to Adorno. On the contrary, Adorno’s philosophy took shape in dread recognition of the reversion of society to the primitive, a dynamic from which he only with luck preserved his own life. The problem that marks the center and cir- cumference of his thought was the effort to comprehend and perhaps even circumvent this logic of progress as regression. Without a doubt the preeminent reason that his work must now be of vital concern in the United States is for what precisely can be learned from it in a na- INTRODUCTION: ORIGIN IS THE GOAL 3 tion that has so palpably entered primitive times. The vindication of torture, the desiderated abrogation of due process while utilizing its
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